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A Showcase With Notable No-Shows

Jason Gore, signing autographs Tuesday, is ranked 144th but is at the Barclays because he is 98th on the FedEx Cup points list.Credit
Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images

EDISON, N.J. — Motorists traveling southbound on Interstate 95 out of Manhattan will pass Rory McIlroy, who gazes down at them from a billboard promoting the Barclays at Plainfield Country Club.

The PGA Tour’s version of the postseason begins here Thursday without McIlroy, a former world No. 1 who essentially gave himself a first-round bye. He skipped the event to reduce strain on his healed left ankle and save his energy for the last three official events of the wraparound season. Sergio García, ranked 10th, also took a pass.

Martin Kaymer is not playing, although not by choice. Kaymer is No. 20 in the world rankings, but in the PGA Tour’s playoff point standings, he finished 139th.

Kaymer’s downfall was twofold. He built into his schedule a vacation because none currently exists in professional golf, taking the first two months of 2015 off to recharge after a 2014 campaign in which he won the United States Open and the Players Championship.

Kaymer’s second mistake, as it were, was posting his best results in events not operated by the PGA Tour. He finished tied for 12th in the last two majors of the season, the British Open and the P.G.A. Championship, where no more points are awarded to the winners than at the tour’s flagship event, the Players. And he produced two fourth-place showings and a third on the European Tour, at events where he received no FedEx Cup points.

If this stretch at the end of a marathon season is truly being conducted to showcase the best golfers in the world, why is Kaymer at home while 144th-ranked Jason Gore finished safely inside the top 125, at No. 98? Is it a merit-based playoff race or one that rewards mean results on the PGA Tour?

On Wednesday, Gore was asked what he made of the fact that he was in this week’s field and Kaymer was not.

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“There is one saying for it, but I probably can’t say it here,” he said. “I guess to be politically correct, it’s a shame.”

Gore sealed his place in the playoffs with a runner-up showing at the regular-season finale in Greensboro, N.C. He finished four strokes ahead of Kaymer en route to his second top 10 in 24 starts.

By failing to qualify for the playoffs, Kaymer, who made 13 starts, fell short of the 15-event minimum needed to keep his PGA Tour privileges. Gore, meanwhile, maintained full playing privileges on the PGA Tour from one season to the next for the first time since 2008-9.

Speaking of Kaymer, Gore said: “The guy won the Players and the U.S. Open last year, and he’s not a tour member? Something’s not right. I mean, there’s loopholes that go the other way with medical and all that good stuff.”

Gore acknowledged, “I know the tour wants these guys to play more events because it’s great,” but added, “It’s a double-edged sword, unfortunately.”

Gore mentioned the ratings-spiking presence in Greensboro of Tiger Woods, who entered the tournament in the hopes of salvaging a lost season by advancing to the playoffs. He needed a victory or solo second-place finish, but Woods, one of six former Nos. 1 in the field, ended up tied for 10th, giving him his lone top-10 finish in 11 starts.

Hudson Swafford, a PGA Tour rookie, is ranked 278th, 21 spots behind Woods, but he is 100th in the playoff standings, even though he is among more than 20 golfers in the field who did not play a major this season. Like Woods, Swafford recorded one top 10 this season, a tie for eighth at the Frys.com last October during the Fall Series.

That is the same Fall Series that Phil Mickelson gave a blunt assessment of during a Ryder Cup news conference in February while applauding the decision to give more weight to dollars earned after the start of 2016 even though the season technically begins in the fall of 2015.

Photo

Martin Kaymer, hitting a tee shot during the 2015 P.G.A. Championship, did not qualify for the playoff series because he did not accumulate enough PGA Tour points.Credit
Richard Heathcote/Getty Images

“If you count money for those last three or four months,” Mickelson said, “you’re giving the bottom half of the tour a three-month head start over ultimately the top guys.”

The top guys take eight weeks off to recharge, as Kaymer did after a 2014 in which he won his second major, helped Europe to victory in the Ryder Cup and made 29 official starts worldwide. The time that Kaymer took off is comparable to what players on a World Series-winning team end up getting, but no matter.

The upside of Kaymer’s losing his PGA Tour membership is that he will be one of the few top-20 players with a more manageable schedule in 2015-16. With the addition of the Olympics to the mix, the coming season, which starts in Northern California the week after the Presidents Cup in South Korea in October, is shaping up to be an ultramarathon.

“You’ve got to conserve some energy for this run,” said Davis Love III, 51, the oldest player in the Barclays field and the captain of next year’s American Ryder Cup team. “It’s not the N.F.L. playoffs or the N.H.L. playoffs, where you’re going to get beat up that bad, but you still have to conserve some energy to make it through all four rounds. So I can see a guy thinking of skipping one.”

Top-ranked Jordan Spieth, the leader in the FedEx Cup points standings, did not consider skipping one, and not just because he has the energy and stamina of a 22-year-old.

“I’m happy to be in that position now, but I’d like to obviously hold it,” said Spieth, who could lose his No. 1 ranking to McIlroy if he plays poorly.

That’s right. McIlroy can return to the top spot without swinging a club and go on to win the FedEx Cup title without gracing all three of the events leading to the Tour Championship in Atlanta. In 2012, McIlroy finished second in the FedEx Cup playoffs despite grinding out wins in two of the first three playoff events and tying for 10th at the Tour Championship.

If Spieth does not end up winning the FedEx Cup race despite the large lead he gained with his season for the ages, it will represent the biggest devaluation of a regular season since the undefeated New England Patriots lost to the Giants in Super Bowl XLII.

For those ranked No. 1 or No. 125 in these playoffs, one thing seems patently clear: Doggedness will get you far, but at some point a steel mind is no substitute for fresh legs.

A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2015, on Page B16 of the New York edition with the headline: A Showcase With Notable No-Shows. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe